


Closet Ghost

by ShinobiCyrus



Series: Closet Ghost [1]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: F/F, Gen, I Blame Tumblr, Music, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Roommates, Skydiving, Slash, Tsunderes, Valerie your tsundere is showing, Yuri, aeroplane, clone, genderswap clone, ghost language, ghost speak, homeless, soundtrack, stowaway, there were no tags for Dani x Val, this is inexcusable, tumblr blaming on everything!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-28
Updated: 2014-08-16
Packaged: 2017-12-27 21:09:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/983642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShinobiCyrus/pseuds/ShinobiCyrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Valerie is trying to balance school, a job, ghost hunting, and taking care of her dad. She really does not have time to deal with a squatter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sky Therapy

It had been so long, Valerie had almost forgotten how much she missed flying

She wondered if it was the same with skateboarders or surfers. How a plank under your feet felt more natural than walking. Even weeks after her dad had confiscated her gear, her feet itched without the rumble of the glider's engine tingling them. Sometimes at school she'd stop in the middle of the hall and her knees suddenly felt like bending to shift her balance and she'd get vertigo from the alien feeling of standing on flat, boring earth instead of the wild, unsteady air.

When she got a hold of the new suit, it was more than just being able to hunt ghosts again. It was Freedom. The chance to plug in a piece of herself and feel _whole_ for the first time in months. Free therapy at thirty-thousand feet. She had the _sky_ again.

She couldn't even feel the tearing winds or the chill of high altitude through the suit. It cocooned her without feeling like she was encased. Maximized protection but full range of motion. It was sleek, responsive, and beyond high-tech. Plus the black and red, extra points for style.

Then again, high-tech wasn't always a good thing. Valerie ended up having shut off most of the flight readouts in her new helmet display because she was too used to doing without. The instruments distracted from the the hard-earned instinct. She didn't need the suit to tell her that a sweltering day like today, hot concrete would be giving off waves of thermals, shifting the cold-air aside. It made for some choppy flying- _if_ you didn't know what you were doing.

Squeezing a little more thrust out of the glider, Valerie coasted along a decent jet stream, shifting her weight instinctively to match the fickle wind as if the air was as easy to ride as a wave at the beach. Some days she even liked to scrape the cloud layer and and pretend she was surfing on all that fluffy white, but the summer sky today was clear and gave perfect visibility for as long as the horizon went. Below her, Amity Park and Elmerton were cute model cities with a thin river painted between them.

At thirty-thousand feet she killed the thrusters and just hovered, standing on nothing but thin steel and desolate blue. Without a bird or plane in sight, she was the only living thing around for miles and miles. If she wanted to, she could keep on going up until she saw starlight and felt her guts shift from zero-gee.

A little thorn of regret needled through her chestplate. If only she could have shown Danny....

Closing her eyes, Valerie balanced two separate thoughts.

The glider's engine shut off. Valerie started to fall and the helmet speakers sang above the din of rushing wind.

“ _I like pleasure spiked with pain and music is my aeroplane. It's my aeroplane...Songbird sweet and sour Jane and music is my aeroplane. It's my aeroplane...”_

Completely calm as she rocketed down to earth at terminal velocity, Velerie flipped so she stood straight down, looking up at the river that grew wider every passing second.

“ _Looking in my own eyes (hey lord) I can't find the love I want...Someone better slap me before I start to rust/Before I start to decompose...”_

She lifted her arms out to her sides and spun around rapidly like a top, then bent backwards so she could grab the tail of her board and pointed its nose down at water's diamond glimmer.

She mentally quashed alarmed elevation counter on her HUD. She preferred to time it without a machine's help. At those speeds, if she was even a bit off it would be over just as quick as if she hit hard pavement, water or not.

“ _I can make it disappear/I can make it dis-ah-pear. Have no fear!”_

At the last possible second, Valerie swung her legs and glider to meet the river and engaged the engines at full power, blasting up a huge geyser and shifted all of her speed horizontal. Skimming just above the surface of the water, she outpaced the waves from her “landing” and raced her reflection on the water's window; saw her own flushed, exhilarated smile and laughed with herself.

Just the usual after-school commute.

When she wondered what time it was, the helmet replied with a digital clock in the corner of her visor. “Yeah, I guess we should be getting home,” she told the other her in the water. Climbing to rooftop altitude, Valerie crossed the rest of the river and set a leisurely course for her apartment while she enjoyed the rest of her custom playlist.

After that fight with Phantom up in orbit, her dad insisted on examining the new ghost gear that had inexplicably come to her aid. Under a electron microscope, what appeared to be a suit was actually made up of billions and billions of nanobots, microscopic machines light-years ahead of anything in the Axion R&D labs. By working together, they could link up and arrange themselves in almost any configuration imaginable. Body armor, weapons, a glider.

They had also bonded directly her nervous system, which allowed her to control them with a thought. For all intents and purposes, the “suit” was a part of her body now- making it impossible to remove safely.

That didn't really fix matters, though. Now that there was no suit or dangerous weapons to lock up out of her reach, there was nothing Damon Grey could do to actually _stop_ his daughter from ghost-hunting. He could forbid her, of course, but they both knew she would just do it behind his back- even though she really didn't want it to come to that. She loved her dad and knew he was only trying to protect her, but ghost-hunting had become something more than just a revenge trip. It was her _calling_ , now. Her home, her family, her school, her classmates...Danny. Everyday ghosts put the people she cared about at risk and she was not the kind of girl who took that shit lying down. If keeping her dad safe meant disobeying him, she'd do it without hesitation.

Which put them at an impasse, really. So they wordlessly came up with a solution: they didn't talk about it. They carried on like everything was normal. Valerie came home from school a normal girl, and her dad pretended to be surprised how fast she had gotten across town at rush hour.

That was why she hushed the glider's jets on the final approach to her apartment building. Keep the illusion as believable as possible.

She thought the music off and landed her board gently on the building's roof. The suit dissolved away into a swirling cloud of black sand and dispersed, hidden but ready to reform in a blink. Without its protection the roof felt like a frying pan under the summer sun.

A piece of duct tape kept the roof door from locking. She walked down three flights of stairs, went out to the hall, and fumbled with her keys at the door.

“Daddy,” she called. “I’m home.”

She sighed at the state of the apartment. It wasn't filthy or anything just...lived in. This was the first day all week Valerie had off from work, and the chores had piled up a little. Her dad tried to help when he could, but he always worked so damn hard trying to put food on the table he was usually exhausted when he got home. Sometimes he never even made it to the bed and just slept in his favorite recliner.

The ugly plaid recliner was empty, which was a good sign.

Damon came out of his room, yawning as he adjusted his tie. “Hey sweetie, welcome home.”

Valerie wiped the sweat under her nose. “It’s a sauna in here. Didn’t the landlord say he would fix the A/C last week?”

“That was before the units in half of the other apartments broke down. Seems like we're a high number on a long list.”

Valerie pushed down the surge of frustration she thought she'd worked off flying. Vindictive old bastard. Still, making them stew a bit longer was all he could really do- every time Valerie saw him in the hall she would smile at him sweating with panic and rubbing his wrist even though it had been out of the cast for months. Pervert was lucky she only gave him a fracture.

_God, I hate this place._

Her dad caught on to her slowly boiling anger.“It's okay, Val. We can make due with fans and shorts for a while longer. Reminds me of when I was just got out of college. Oh right, almost forgot- how was school today?”

“It was fine,” she shrugged. “Mr. Lancer handed back our essay tests for _A Movable Feast_ we wrote last week.”

“And…?”

She tried to not make it such a big deal. “B plus.”

“Only a B?” He managed the scowl for a whole five seconds before it cracked into a smile. “That’s my girl. I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks, Dad. Did you want me to start on dinner?”

“Sorry hon, It looks like you’re on your own again tonight. I had to pick up some extra hours at the lab.”

“Second shift again? I know things are a little tight right now, but that’s no excuse to run yourself ragged.”

He held his daughter's shoulders and gave her a sad smile that told Valerie that at that moment it wasn’t her he was really seeing. “You sound just like your mother,” he said. “Let me be the dad and worry about money. You just be a kid for a little bit longer, okay?”

“Okay Daddy,” she bowed her head so he could kiss the top it.

“Don’t stay up too late- and save me some leftovers.” He shrugged on his beat-up sports coach that had survived the wreckage of the moving van. Halfway out the door he remembered, “Love you.”

“You too,” she told the slamming door.

Alone, Valerie busied herself by straightening up a little. It wasn't that big a task; the entire apartment could have fit in the living room of her old place, bedrooms and all. She ran the vaccum quickly over the carpet and the ugly corduroy couches, rolled up a half-eaten bag of chips her dad probably thought was a suitable replacement for a meal and brushed the crumbs off the coffee table.

They didn't have a dishwasher anymore, so the dishes from dinner and breakfast had to be washed by hand. Elbow-deep in suds and hot water, she scrubbed a pan and hummed, “Sitting in my kitchen (hey girl) I'm turning into dust again. My melancholy baby, the star of mazzy must. Push her voice inside of me. I'm overcoming gravity, I'm over coming gravity...”

She had to dry the pot and saucepan so they could be used for dinner. Remembering the bag of chips, Valerie decided to pull out two packages of ground turkey for a big batch of pasta- enough for dinner and leftovers Dad could take to work.

The stove was a spitting hellbeast that would make the already sweltering apartment an oven in its own right. Before she made herself suffer, Valerie set the ground turkey to defrost in the outdated microwave and headed to her room to change into some lighter summer clothes.

She knew something was wrong the second she opened the door. The A/C was broken in the middle of a summer heatwave, and her room was so chilly she could see her breath in the air.

A cold spot. Cold spot meant _ghosts._

Nanites crawled over her like a thick swarm of ants as they linked together to form her suit. She tried not to think of the movie _Aliens_ as the ecto-sensor pinged in her helmet. The visor switched light spectrums, showing Valerie the coldest area in her room was behind her closet door.

Of course, a ghost in the closet. Typical.

The suit built a blaster on her wrist and she steadied her arm as she carefully approached her closet. Every step she took made the pinging more urgent. Very, very slowly, she reached for the handle; the pinging was so fast it sounded like a solid tone.

Valerie threw the sliding door open, blaster primed. “Ah-ha!”

“ _AAAH!”_ Something screamed and flew at her. Startled, Valerie fired her blaster on reflex.

All the shot hit was a pile of blankets arranged in her closet like a nest. A familiar voice echoed above her and Valerie wheeled around, wrist blaster ready, only to lower it when she finally recognized the white-haired girl hovering with her on the ceiling.

“ _Wa trakh_ _,_ that was close!” Danielle clutched her 'D' symbol on her chest like she was fending off a heart attack. “Jeez, why don’t you watch where you point that thing?”

Valerie stood there, briefly dumbfounded by the ghost girl that had just come flying out of her closet and by the fact that her helmet apparently had a built-in translator for ghost-speak.

Girl had a _mouth_ _._

“Me?” Valerie demanded, finding her voice with vigor. “Why the hell were you in my closet!”

Dani crossed her arms and legs and sat down open air. “Because it’s too cramped under your bed.”

“No,” Valerie said slowly. “I meant: why are you _here_ in my apartment?”

“Oh. Well...” she scratched the back of her head sheepishly. “I was in town and kinda needed a place to crash. I meant to be gone before you got home but... I guess I sort of...fell asleep.”

“I'll say,” Valerie sighed at her burnt, ruined blankets. “So is there a reason my closet was a prime choice over staying with Phantom? He's your cousin or something, isn't he?”

“No!” Danielle blurted. She blushed and stammered at Valerie's confounded look. “I mean...it's not really possible. My being there. It would cause a lot of problems and...and...Look, it's a ghost thing, okay? You wouldn't get it.”

Feeling a headache coming on, the ghost-hunter moved her hand to rub the bridge of her nose before remembering the visor over her face. “Okay,” Valerie said tolerantly. “Will you just...come down from there? I'd rather not have to crane my neck talking to you.”

Dani floated down to eye level, which meant her feet hovered somewhere at Valerie's knees. “Sorry about surprising you and junk. And...y'know...about the blankets.”

“Yeah, sorry about trying to shoot you,” Valerie said. “You know you could have just _asked,_ right?”

“Well I mean, you're a ghost hunter and stuff.” Dani said looked down at the floor. “I wasn't sure you'd say yes.”

Valerie had no real response for that. She wasn't honestly sure if she would have. “Why pick me of all people anyw-” a loud, garbling noise coming from Dani's stomach cut her off. The girl laughed and flashed Valerie a toothy, nervous grin.

“Dani,” Valerie said. “When was the last time you ate?”

“I might have helped myself to some potato chips earlier...”

“I mean a real meal.”

“Uuh...oh! I scrounged up a pretty nice brunch on Tuesday!”

“It's Thursday,” Valerie pointed out.

“Oh wow, really? Huh. Time flies when you don't own a calendar.”

Valerie groaned, cursing herself, and finally said, “I'm making pasta for dinner tonight. There's plenty of it, if you want.”

She saw the sudden, bright look in Danielle's eyes that was as much hope as gnawing hunger.“Really? You mean you'd let me stay for over dinner?”

“ _Just_ for dinner,” Valerie corrected her sternly, and instantly regretted her tone with the kicked puppy look the girl tried to hide. “That is...I'd be a pretty rotten host to just shove a bowl at you and kick you out. You can crash in my room for the night, but you have to promise to be gone by the time I leave for school tomorrow, _capiche_?”

“Score!” Dani pumped the air, flashed back to her human shape, and landed on Valerie's floor in beat-up sneakers. “I mean...totally! I won't make you regret this Val, promise!”

For just a moment, Valerie felt an inexplicable twinge in her chest. Something about the expression on Danielle's face; that shy goofiness, the shade of blue in her eyes- it just seemed so...so...familiar?

Nah, it was probably nothing. She shook her head to clear out the rattling thoughts and dismissed her armor. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever,” she said. “Just don't think this is gonna be a regular thi-” Without the helmet, Valerie smelled something that positively _reeked_ like sun-cooked sweat. She sniffed again and grimaced. “Ugh. Okay, before you're doing _anything_ else here you are cleaning yourself up. You smell like you haven't had a bath in a month.”

“Hey! I swam around in a lake last week!”

“Hot water and soap, ghost-hobo,” Valerie said. “Aw hell, it makes no sense to clean you up if all you've got is that funky hoodie. I'll have to find you something to wear while we put your clothes in the wash.”

“My clothes?” Danielle shrugged. “Okay, whatever.” Valerie yelped when the girl unselfconsciously pulled her hoodie, and the filthy shirt under it, over her head.

“Ah! Not _here_! The bathroom, the bathroom!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song is "Aeroplane" by Red Hot Chili Peppers. Hopefully that's it's for all the song stuff. The ghost-language thing is a sort of tumblr headcanon, which I really can't get into but makes perfect sense, trust me.


	2. Take Only What You Need

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from MGMT's "Kids"

With Danielle corralled in the shower, Valerie threw on some shorts and a light top so she wouldn't die from heat stroke, tossed Danielle's grungy clothes in a washer down in the basement, and got started on dinner.

There was an old plastic radio screwed to the bottom of one of the cabinets, yellowed and speckled with age and splattered food. Valerie cranked up some Alternative to drown out the shower while she worked on the spaghetti. The Grays hadn't exactly been domestic back at their old place; she'd spent most of her time out with friends while Damon worked long hours paying off their ridiculously spacious two-story and Valerie's mall-binges. The first few weeks in the apartment were a lot of charred meals, but once she started paying more attention in Home-Ec and grabbed a few easy recipes online Valerie actually started to like cooking. Go figure.

Once the hamburger was good and brown, she added the pasta sauce, sprinkled a few seasonings, stirred, covered the saucepan so it could simmer in its own flavor for a while, then went to check on the pot of nearly-boiling water. A voice behind her piped, “Is dinner done yet?” and Valerie nearly jumped out of her skin and dove for the nearest sharp utensil.

“Oops. Sorry!” Danielle laughed, sounding anything but. The towel hung off her bare shoulders like a scarf while she dripped a puddle on the kitchen tile. Hopping excitedly on her toes, she leaned over the pan and took a deep, appreciative whiff. “Whoa, this smells great! Do we get to eat soon?”

Valerie glanced slightly to Danielle's left, because of course if you take someone's clothes to be washed it was a good idea remember to _leave_ them some. “How 'bout we you get decent first?”

No, that wasn't the right word. There was nothing indecent about Danielle cluelessly looked down at herself, trying to figure out what was wrong. Girl was so unselfconscious she acted like she'd been raised without even being taught the __concept__ of body-shyness. Not like Valerie was shy either, she changed every day in girl's locker room after gym. What unsettled her so much was how... _bare_ Danielle was. Without the oversized hoodie and the baggy shorts, she looked too frail. Vulnerable. So skinny Valerie could count her ribs, the rough scars and calluses on her feet, the yellow blotches of old bruises on too-white skin, the pale pinprick scars dotting the crook of her arms.

For God's sake, she was just a _kid_.

“What happened to my clothes, anyway?” Danielle asked, more out of curiosity than modesty.

“Those rags were a health hazard. I took them downstairs for heavy-duty washing.”

Dani rubbed the back of her head with sheepishly.“I guess they _were_ a bit on the smelly side.”

Valerie felt another attack of _d_ _ _éjà vu__ like amateur acupuncture the back of her neck. There was something so...familiar about that goofy, embarrassed grin, the shade of blue of her eyes, the quizzical tilt of her head when Valerie stayed quiet for too long.

“...Val?” Dani asked. Her damp, unbound hair glistened like polished obsidian.

She knelt down to Dani's eye-level, face to face with those those big, trusting eyes. She didn't even flinch when Valerie reached out and took the towel off her shoulders so she could wrap it around Dani's torso properly.

There. That was better, having her all swaddled all up in the towel like a big, protective blanket. “Come on,” Valerie stood. “Let's see if we can find you something to wear.”

She managed to scrounge up a clean pair of boxers with forgiving elastic and gave Dani the Dumpty Humpty tee she'd bought for that concert she never went to. It was few sizes too big on the little shrimp- the hem went down to her thighs like a dress- but Dani tugged on it gleefully and insisted she loved it. So while Valerie boiled pasta, the radio blared and Danielle danced around the apartment with no sense of rhythm to MGMT's 'Kids'

Turning down the stovetop, Valerie rummaged around the cabinets for a colander. Dani literally hovered over her shoulder, floating about a foot in the air. “Why's that bowl thingie have all those holes?”

“It's a colander,” Valerie explained. “It's for draining water from the pasta.”

“Oh. So why do you hafta boil it?”

“Makes it soft and tender. Kinda hard to eat when it's hard.”

Dani pondered this development by watching Valerie drain the steaming spaghetti into the colander. “Oooooh! So you're supposed to put it in water _before_ you eat it? That makes a lot more sense.”

Valerie turned to look at her. “...you've eaten uncooked pasta, haven't you?”

“It's not that bad! Kinda crunchy.”

Valerie groaned and massaged the bridge of her nose. The mental image of Danielle munching on open box of raw spaghetti came way too easily.

“What?” Dani titled her head again like a puzzled puppy, completely lost.

“Nothing. How about you set the table while I serve the food?”

“Sure!” Dani agreed eagerly. She glanced at the table, back to Valerie and asked. “Uh...set it with what?”

Unbelievable. Had she lived her entire life (Afterlife? After-afterlife?) in that brainbending ghost-zone place with absolutely no idea how clothes and pasta and basic human interaction worked?

Valerie turned to Dani and saw that she'd found the empty spaghetti box and was intently reading the instructions on the back as if she were taking a test on it tomorrow.

Okay, all signs pointed to yes.

Opening up the cupboards and drawers, Valerie showed Danielle the bowls, cups, and silverware and gave her a crash course on basic table etiquette. When dinner was finally pronounced served, the ghost-girl whooped eagerly and perched on the chair with her knees tucked up into her shirt. Before Valerie was even done serving, Dani attacked her bowl and started shoveling the huge gobs of spaghetti as fast she could chew.

Almost like she hadn't eaten anything but a bag of potato chips in days.

At least she knew how to use a fork. Valerie had half-expected her to comb her hair with it. Too bad she probably wouldn't get the Disney reference. “Whoa there, slow down at bit, kid. You're gonna give yourself a stomachache at that rate. Or maybe forget to breathe.”

“ _Thowwy,_ ” she mumbled with a full mouth, and swallowed. “Heh. Sorry. I'm used to scarfing down as much as I can.”

“Well you don't have to worry about that here. I'm not gonna take it away. Just try to leave some left over for my dad, okay? I'd rather not explain to him that a stray ghost-girl went and ate his share of dinner.”

“That's _half_ -ghost, thank you much.”

“Yeah, about that,” Valerie twirled her fork in the pasta. “How does that work, exactly, a human with ghost powers?”

“It's...complicated,” Still tucked into her shirt like a turtle, Dani wiggled on her chair and crammed more pasta into her mouth, with a little less urgency at least.

“Complicated, huh?” She took a methodical bite and asked, “Would it happen to have anything to do with the fact that Vlad Masters has ghost powers, too?”

Danielle nearly choked. “You _know_?!”

“Figured it out after me and Phantom rescued you. And by 'figured it out,' I mean I caught him giving himself a pat on the back and laughing about what a gullible moron I was. Literally, there was two of him.”

Slamming her palms on the tabletop, Dani stood up sharply and leaned over, eyes huge and panicked. _“Does he know you know?!”_

“What?” Valerie replied dumbly, taken aback by Dani's whiplash mood change. “No, I don't think so.”

“Val, this is important! If he even thinks for a _second_ that you know...”

“Relax, he doesn't know. I'm keeping my cards close to my chest. Gonna keep playing dumb, let him think he's got a ignorant pawn in his pocket. Play the long game and wait for the right moment. Human or ghost, I am taking him _down_.”

Dani clenched her fingers tight on the edge of the table. “You're not _getting_ it, Val! He's more powerful than any ghost you've ever met!”

“Hey, I went up against the _King_ of ghosts, and that one-eyed mother wiped the floor with Vlad _and_ Phantom.” Of course he'd also kicked Valerie's ass six ways to Sunday, but that part wasn't important.

“No, no, no,” Dani shook her head with mounting anxiety. “You don't know. You don't know what he's like, you don't know what he's capable of...”

Okay, that was true. Valerie had no idea what the real Vlad was like. Three months ago she'd thought Vlad Masters was like some kind of real-life, ghost-hunting Batman; a multi-billionaire ghost hunter secretly using his money and influence to protect people from ectoplasmic monsters, even taking a promising down-on-her-luck high school kid under his wing as an apprentice.

And it had all been bullshit.

He'd played her and Valerie had bought it. She trusted him, looked up- practically idolized him as her great mentor so that when Phantom and Dani tried to warn her over and over again that Vlad was _bad fucking news_ , she'd ignored them and kept on shooting.

Exactly like Danielle was trying to tell her now.

Just the thought of Vlad had the poor kid's hands shaking, her blue eyes wet and imploring. She was scared, Valerie realized, not just of Vlad- Dani was scared _for her_. The girl that tricked her, used her to betray the only family she had, and turned her over to be tortured and melted down. After all that, Danielle was afraid of Vlad hurting her.

“Please Val,” Dani pleaded. “Promise me you won't try to fight him on your own.”

God, how could she even say 'no' to that face? How had she looked at her and thought she was some evil, dangerous ghost?

Answer: because apparently she's really really stupid.

“Okay,” Valerie said. “I promise.”

Dani half-collapsed back into her chair with relief and smiled gratefully. “Thanks Val. Hey, maybe when the time is right for real we can take him together? You, me, and Danny, just like we did last time!”

Val decided not to point out that Vlad probably threw that fight to keep his cover intact. Then again, he'd been pretty surprised when Dani came at him with those ecto-powered kicks to his face. Her coming back from being a bucket of ooze probably hadn't figured into his master-plan.

With Valerie no longer in mortal danger in her mind, Danielle happily went back to dinner, already scraping the bottom of her bowl. Valerie half-heartedly picked at hers. She was still working on her first bowl as Dani started piling her second helping and dug in without any sign of slowing.

Valerie's food still went untouched. For some reason she'd lost her appetite. Something like a stomachache gnawed on her insides.

Like something wanted out. Valerie opened her mouth, felt the words wriggle down her through. She swallowed. “Dani?” God, it was weird to call her that. Her first thought always went back to the boy she'd left heartbroken on the school lawn.

“Huh?” Dani looked up with pasta sauce around her mouth like badly applied lipstick.

“I don't-” Valerie faltered, and had to try again. “I don't think I ever really...apologized to you for what I did. Before.”

“Aw, Val, you don't hafta apologize! Especially after all this food and this rad shirt!”

“You saved my life and I paid you back by tricking you, stabbing you in the back, and turning you over to Vlad so he could melt you down into goop. I think an apology, a bowl of pasta, and a t-shirt is _literally_ the least I could do.”

“It's totally not your fault for believing him! Trust me, Vlad's an expert at messing with people's heads! I mean, come on, he's got everyone in town fooled!”

“Everyone in town aren't ghost hunters,” Valerie replied ruefully. Here she thought she was such hot shit, and she couldn't even figure out her own mentor was a- “The _Fentons_.” Valerie blurted without thinking. “They're ghost hunters and Vlad is old college buddies with Jack and Maddie Fenton. God, he's practically Danny's Uncle and they have no id-”

Dani's head perked up, tensing like a jumpy rabbit when a hawk's shadow passed over it.“You know the Fentons?”

Valerie was surprised for a moment that Dani knew about them. But Phantom had mentioned that had a reputation among the ghost community.

“A bit,” Valerie shrugged. Yep, just took shelter in their house during an invasion of ghostly skeletons and then had a thing with their son before breaking it off and crushing his heart because, in case it wasn't clear, she's really goddamn stupid. “I go to school with their kids.”

The explanation didn't look to have reassured Dani much. She looked at Valerie with a pensive, unreadable expression. “Oh. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense, I guess.”

“I wouldn't worry so much about them,” Valerie tried to reassure her. “They can build Ghost Shields that can cover an entire town or ecto...whatever that crap was that fixed you up, but they can't figure out their best friend from college is an evil half-ghost? Then again, why _would_ they suspect anything? Nobody knows half-ghosts are even possible, so why would it even cross their mind?” She looked at Dani in askance. “How the hell _is_ it possible, anyway? Was he bit by a radioactive poltergeist? One of his parents got freaky at a séance?”

“It was some kind of lab accident, I think,” she shrugged.

“Is that what happened to you, too? An accident?”

Danielle picked at her food, the desire to stuff her face abruptly gone.

Good one, Valerie. Start interrogating the half-ghost girl and make her feel like some kind of side-show freak. She could have slapped herself. “I'm sorry. You don't have to tell me, if you don't want to. I was just-”

“No, no, it's okay,” Dani said. “I was born the way I am.”

 _Born_ half ghost? Well that re-introduced the disturbing 'ghost mating with a human' theory. That still didn't explain why Vlad had wanted Valerie to-

Wait.

The same day Valerie finds out half-ghosts are a thing that exist, she stumbled onto _two_ of them? No way that was a coincidence. But if Vlad got his powers unnaturally and Danielle was _born_ with them then...

Oh God.

“He's your father, isn't he?”

Danielle flinched, and Valerie knew she was right.

Staring down at her plate to avoid looking at Valerie, Danielle twirled the pasta without taking another bite. Her throat slowly worked the words out. “Not in the conventional way...but I guess...well...he created me. So yeah, he's kinda the closest thing in the world I have to a dad.” She laughed; it was a sad, bitter, unnatural sound that had no business coming from the same girl whose first instinct after nearly dying was playing a prank on her cousin.“How utterly fucked up is that, right?”

“He...created you?”

“In his lab. There were others. My...brothers, I guess you could call them.”

Valerie remembered the laboratory underneath Vlad's mansion. The examination table with the steel restraints, a tray of sharp, nightmarish medical instruments straight from a demented dentist's collection. She was afraid to but, still asked, “What happened to them?”

“They were...” Dani weighed the word. “...unstable.”

“Unstable as in crazy?”

“That too. They were crazy and violent and totally obedient to everything Vlad said, but they were imperfect. All of us were.”

“Imperfect?

“Vlad was obsessed with creating the perfect half-ghost. The others came out...wrong. Messed-up. I was the first one that could actually turn into a human and say more than three syllables at a time.”

“But you still had the...melting problem,” Valerie said.

“Yeah. But Vlad promised he could fix me if we had Danny. So I went to him, pretended to be his friend, and when the time came, I helped Vlad capture him. Put him in a lab. Experiment on him.”

Well that sounded like a familiar situation.

“Danny tried to warn me about him- that he didn't care about me or any of my brothers, that he was never going to cure me. But he was my _dad_. What was I supposed to-” she stopped, whole body jittery, a little ball of anxiety tucked into one of Valerie's old shirts. “But he was right. He was right about everything. Vlad never wanted me, he wanted his perfect _son_. I was just some...tool to do his dirty work until I melted too much to be useful, anymore.”

She gave Valerie a stern look. “So when I say I know what it's like have Vlad in your head, I know what I'm saying. So like, stop blaming yourself, okay? 'Cause I'm not.”

Valerie said nothing, at first. Her gaze lingered up Danielle's thin, pale arms. Scars like white periods that could only be track marks from medical needles, administered over and over again.

Dani said that Vlad 'created' her. Had he experimented on ghosts to make them part human? Or- good God- took humans and made them into half-ghosts? She felt like there was a huge, gaping hole keeping her from seeing the whole picture, and she had an inkling just what that was.

“What about Phantom?” Valerie asked. “You two are supposed to be cousins or something, right?”

“Danny's...different,” Dani bit her lip. “I...listen, Val. I'd never lie to you, but that doesn't mean I can tell you everything about him. Danny's secrets aren't mine to tell.”

“What I can say, though,” she went on. “Is that he's family, and he's a really good guy. Yeah, he messes up sometimes, but he always tries to do the right thing, y'know?”

It was hard to argue with that. After they saved Danielle, Phantom could have tried to pull a fast one- hell, he and Danielle could have double-teamed her and escaped, God knows she probably deserved it. Instead he'd surrendered, fully willing to go back chained up for more sessions with Mr. Sparky. He'd kept his word.

Shit. The damn ghost that ruined her life was more honest than she was.

Dani had mentioned brothers before, but she still referred to Phantom as a cousin. Anyone could see the resemblance was more than passing. So if they really _were_ family, then it stood to reason that they had a relative in common.

Maybe something like a “father.”

Was that what this was all about? Had Vlad, the half-ghost with a full dose of crazy, experimented on ghosts and people trying to make another half breed like him? If Dani and her 'brothers' had been the closest he came to succeeding, was her 'cousin' just another ghost creation he'd written off as a failure? Phantom definitely wasn't like other ghosts. If it wasn't for the eyes and the weird ghostly glow, he could probably pass for human. A weirdo goth-Hungarian exchange student or something, but human.

With Vlad occupying so much of her attention, Valerie hadn't even made a half-hearted effort of hunting Phantom down. Yeah she still loathed the intangible douchebag, but not enough to...y'know, try and vaporize him, or something.

But old habits were hard to shake; a part of her was still hardwired to freaking _obsess_ over that ghost. And now she had Danielle, someone with all the answers she could want, every instinct yearning for them like an itch- except...

Except Valerie had said that she wouldn't pry. So she wouldn't.

She hung her head and sighed, looking down at her unfinished pasta, and saw Danielle's still-occupied bowl. Well, if all this drama had officially shot down dinner...

“Do you want ice cream?” Valerie asked.

Dani slowly raised her head. “...you have _ice cream_?”

There was a gallon tub of the cheapest, most off-brand neapolitan ice cream tucked in the back of the freezer. Valerie grabbed two fresh bowls, two gigantic spoons, and piled as many scoops as they could hold. Then added two more.

“You ever have ice cream before?” Valerie asked.

“Yeah! I found this truck playing music just full of it! How awesome is that?”

“You gave yourself brain freeze, didn't you?”

“Is _that_ what that's called?” Dani asked. “Huh. Do they have a word like that when you bite the ice cream and it like, does the the same thing to your teeth?”

“You're not supposed bite into it dorkwad.”

“Well duh, I know that _noooowww..._ ”

Without fail, ten minutes later, Danielle was clutching her head and moaning about brain freeze while Valerie laughed herself breathless.

After demolishing what could only be described as stupid-amounts of ice cream, Valerie decided to harness some of Danielle's perpetual energy to at least help with the clean up. They scooped the leftover pasta into Tupperware and put it away in the fridge for later. The dishwasher had been broken since she'd moved in (“I'll get to it when I have time, sweetheart,” the Landlord always promised, and Valerie thought about fracturing his other wrist), so while she soaked the dishes in soapy water Danielle rinsed and dried, a mind-numbingly normal chore something altogether new and exciting for a girl that had never done anything domestic before.

They didn't even talk while they worked, except whenever Valerie showed her where to put away the clean dishes to. Danielle even marveled how their hands were “all wrinkly, isn't that weird?”

Valerie checked the clock. Table cleared, dinner dishes washed, leftovers squared away, and it was only seven. She wasn't used to having so much done so early, but she supposed that was what happened when you had an extra set of hands.

“Will the apartment still be here if I go and take a shower for ten minutes?” she asked. 

Dani tapped her chin thoughtfully. “'Here' as in still standing or 'here' as in still in this dimension?”

“Don't care, so long as the hot water still works.”

Grabbing a towel and a change of clothes, Valerie locked the bathroom door (stupid, when her guest could just walk _through_ it), and undressed while she waited for the shower spray to heat up.

As it turned out, the hot water did not work anymore.

She fucking hated this apartment.

Normally Valerie liked to stretch her showers out a little. Just enjoy the relaxing heat and think about nothing. Wanting to keep her extremities from snapping off, she kept this one brief. Shampoo, soap, scrub, and rinse. Her teeth were chattering by the time she shut off the water and climbed out, and wrapped herself in a towel for the heat as much as getting herself dry.

Just think positively, she reminded herself. With the busted A/C, a little cold shower during a heatwave wasn't so bad.

She dressed herself in the bathroom, instead of just going down the hall to her room like she usually did. But that would mean Dani might see in her wearing nothing but a towel, and there'd been enough awkward nudity for the night. Or the year, as far as Valerie was concerned. Brushing her teeth fast, Valerie clicked the door open and peeked into the living room. Danielle was sitting cross legged on the carpet, her attention fully on the pink cartoon dog with a huge hole in its tooth doing antics on TV.

She slipped into her room.

After Phantom and his ghost-dog had demolished most of what they had in the moving van, Valerie had managed to hunt down a full-length mirror from a flea market at a decent price. The wood frame, intricately carved with ornamental lilies, was dull and scratched, which pretty much explained the bargain.

In front of the mirror, she dragged a comb through the thick tangle of her hair; the heat always made it frizzy and wild. She stopped when she spotted Danielle's reflection peeking at her from the door frame.

“What are you doing?” She asked.

Valerie wheeled around to face her. Jeez, kid didn't even know what a _hair brush_ was? “It's a comb,” she said, careful to not sound like she was berating her. “People use it to clean their hair and style it.”

“Why?”

“Cause it looks better.”

“Oh.” She took a lock of her own straight, dark hair and looked back at Valerie, like she was comparing them.

Valerie gave Dani's hair and appraising eye. It didn't look too bad for a girl that literally had never put a comb through it before. Probably a lot of tangles and split ends. “Well, you look like you could use a little maintenance,” Valerie decided. She sat down on the bed and patted a spot. “Sit down, I'll show you how.”

Dani gleefully hopped on the mattress, way too excited for something so simple. Valerie had to gently grasp her shoulders to make her stop bouncing like an overeager puppy. Once she got her to stand still, Valerie settled behind her. It had been a while since she'd brushed hair that wasn't hers, and it didn't take nearly as much effort to run the brush through Dani's long, straight hair.

It really was in amazing shape for having never been combed before. Maybe it was a ghost thing? If her whole body could go floaty and intangible, maybe it made her snowy white locks a little more durable. All Valerie knew was that just a week without a proper brush she'd probably look like some crazed forest-dweller.

The idea crossed her mind, and not for the first time, that maybe she ought to try a military buzz-cut. Just go for the full GI Jane look. Sure as hell would be less of a hassle.

But nah, that'd be stupid.

Dani was being very quiet while she worked. Valerie leaned forward to glance at her face- her eyes were closed and her smile was distantly blissful.

“This is nice,” Dani said without opening her yes.

“Hmm,” Valerie hummed absently. The last time she'd been trusted with someone elses' hair was Star and Paulina's, at a slumber party about two eternities ago. Paulina tended to talk her ear off whenever Valerie let her style her 'do, efficient but rough with only half her attention going into her hands. Star, normally a chatterbox with the attention of golden retriever, barely said a word when she really focused on a task; she was always much gentler with Valerie's hair, and Valerie always tried to return the favor.

It'd been so long she'd forgotten how much she missed it. Missed them.

Dani looked over her shoulder. “Do you want me to do you?”

Valerie stopped moving the brush. “No, no thanks. I'm...my hair's good.”

“Oh,” Valerie heard the disappointment Dani tried to hide. “Okay.” She runs up to the mirror and feels through her hair experimentally. “Wow! This feels a whole lot nicer. Looks loads better too, thanks!”

“Yeah, no big,” Valerie said. “So listen, I've actually got some homework that I need to do, so if you want to watch TV in the living room or something, just keep the volume down.”

“Can I hang out in here if I'm quiet?” Dani asked hopefully.

“...sure, I guess,” Valerie said, and already regretted it. “So long as you're quiet.”

“You got it! I mean...” she made her voice lower. _“You got it.”_

Valerie sighed. Yeah, definitely regretting it already.

She hefted her Chem text out of her backpack, moved her pile of not!obsessive ghost research to a corner on her desk, and stared reading a chapter on the oh-so fascinating history of chemistry. Well, at least she wouldn't have to do any calculations. Valerie's math expertise was pretty much limited to calculating percentages for department store sales and variable wind speeds for flying at high altitudes.

To her credit, Dani kept her lips zipped while Valerie worked on the assigned questions _(Who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry?)_ , but she proved to be just as distracting by sitting on the corner of the bed and _watching_ her. It was like she could _hear_ the pile of unasked questions squirming around in her, all wanting to come out. What are you reading? What's homework? What's the deal with school anyway? Who was the Greek philosopher that proposed the existence of atoms?

Wait no that was question twelve.

It took a very long twenty-five minutes until Valerie finally tucked her worksheet into the Chem book and slammed it shut, she was almost relieved. Not that she'd been counting. At all.

Somewhere between question eighteen and twenty, Dani had migrated from the bed to the floating in front of the bookshelf hanging on the wall. It couldn't even be called a book shelf, just a plank of wood Valerie had screwed to the wall to keep a few books on martial arts and a handful of novels she'd read enough to keep.

“Hey Val, how come you have two copies of the same book here?”

Valerie froze when she saw the yellow-paged, dog-eared copy of _Watership Down_ Danielle was holding.

“Be careful with that!” Dani flinched away when Valerie nearly lunged for it. “Sorry. Just...please be gentle with it. That was my mom's.”

Just the word made Dani look down at the cover like it was some holy relic. “Your mom?”

“Yeah, she...” Valerie couldn't tell if it was embarrassment or dusty grief that kept her eyes from meeting Dani's. “She read that when she was a kid, and then she used to read it to me.”

Dani handed the book to Valerie very carefully, like handling something fragile and priceless. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to-”

“It's fine, you didn't know.” She braced for the inevitable questions, a hesitant comment about the notable lack-of-Mom in the apartment.

“So what's the other one, for then?” Dani asked instead, pointing at the second, fresher copy.

Valerie's brain stumbled. Danielle continued to hover, still pointing at the book as if her mom had never been brought up. “It's...just this cheap edition I got so I can reread it without putting more wear on the older one.”

Dani nodded. “That makes sense.” She picked up the well-read copy and examined the cover. “So it's about like...bunnies or something?”

“Something like that.” She still held the one her mom had left her. The musty smell from the pages went up her nose into her brain and triggered memories of curling up in blankets, her mother's voice soft but strong and changing pitch when she spoke as Hazel or Fiver.

“You can keep that one, if you want,” Valerie told her.

“Huh? Really?” Dani asked uncertainly. “Are you sure?”

“Sure,” Valerie said. She frowned when something occurred to her- Dani intently scrutinizing that box of pasta and the book's cover. “Unless you...that is...”

“What?”

“Can...you...y'know... _read_?”

“Hey!” She put her hands on her hips. “I can read just fine! And I'm pretty good at languages other than English, too! How about you? _Você falar Português?_ ” She cupped her ear and leaned toward Valerie expectantly. “ _Não?¿Qué hay de Español?”_

“Okay, okay, you made your point, show-off.” Valerie grumbled. “Do you want it or not?”

Dani looked back down at the cover skeptically. “...bunnies?”

“It has blood and violence.”

“Sweet!” She hugged it to her chest. “Thanks Val! I promise I'll bring it back when I'm done with it!”

Bring it back. Right, because the deal was Dani would be gone in the morning. She looked over a the clock. “We should probably go downstairs and get your clothes. They've probably been sitting in the machine a while. Then we'll see if we can find you some blankets that don't have blaster scorches on 'em.”

“Heheh, oh yeah,” Dani chortled. “I totally spooked you, earlier.”

“I almost shot you in the face, you dork.”

“Yeah, because I _totally_ had you spooked. Try to keep up, Val.”

Valerie stopped at the door and grinned with an idea. “Hey. If you really wanna spook someone, do you mind if we take a little detour? I think my landlord would just _love_ to meet you.”

“Sure!” Dani agreed immediately. “What's a landlord?”

* * *

They broke into a giggle-fit all the way back up the stairs from the laundry room, and when they thought they'd finally gotten over them when they got to Valerie's apartment, they locked eyes for a few seconds and started all over again.

For the first time ever, Valerie actually envied ghosts. Invisible screwing-around with people was much sweeter than quickly snapping a few bones. The bastard was gonna be twitchy at every shadow, loud noise, and toaster oven for _months_.

Valerie found a few extra blankets squeezed in the back of the linen closet, and helped Dani put the little nest she'd made in Valerie's closet back together again. It was actually a cozy looking setup- enough so that Valerie wasn't guilty about not offering Dani half of the bed.

On hot nights, Valerie usually left her window wide open. It let in light from the street lamps and the late-night din, but it beat sweating while you were trying to sleep.

That night, the window was closed and a cold, ghostly glow emanated from Valerie's closet like a night light.

“Hey Val?” Dani shifted, her body shifting the shadows on the ceiling.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for letting me crash here, for tonight. And for washing my stuff. And for the food. And like...everything.”

“Don't mention it,” Valerie said. “Y'know, you never did answer my question.”

“Huh? Which one?”

“Of all the closets you could possibly hide in…why mine?”

The shadows on the ceiling bobbed once, like a shrug. “It was the safest place I could think of.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey wow look at that an update. I was pretty much chiseling away on this draft off and on for months, until the last three weeks I just decided to focus pretty much exclusively on it. All and all very pleased with the final product, even got enough extra material to add one more chapter to close this story off and start adding other stories in the Closet Ghost series. Yes there will be a series. I have a problem with these two dorks and it shows no sign of abating.
> 
> Man, I developed a lot of spontaneous headcanons writing this- Dani being clueless about everyday stuff or learning a few foreign languages on her world-hopping tour were fun but the part about some of Dani's scars being from Vlad's experiments backfire on me on me. Seriously, I've written about her having scars before but then I saw fanart from one of my stories the difference between writing it and seeing it is me feeling terrible and moaning "Oh God she's just a little ghost-kid how could I DO that to her?!"
> 
> Hope you guys enjoyed it! Kudos or comments are always appreciated. As a writer I subsist entirely on a diet of praise and easily-chewable Mercedes Lackey paperbacks.


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